T.J. Duchene <t.j.duchene <at> gmail.com> writes:

>
> If I might add my opinion to the discussion, I will be very clear in saying
> that even attempting to stay somewhat in sync with Debian is a waste of
> valuable time and effort, and deserves a resounding “No” vote.

haaang on... :)

> the subject of systemd, but I'll be as direct as I can when I say that if
> Devuan does not go its own way, completely and entirely without compromise,
> it's going to “whither on the vine” under the sheer workload of spending
> increasing time to trying maintain package compatibility for people who want
> to jump back and forth.

i believe you may be severely underestimating the workload that the
current debian maintainers handle. there are over 35,000 packages,
and i believe something like 1,000 maintainers. there are something
like 12 ports to different architectures, and the mirrors (of which
there are around a hundred) require something like 160 gigabytes of space
and tend to redline whatever network bandwidth they're allowed,
particularly during upgrades.

debian is *big*.

to expect even a medium-sized team to cope with 10 to 100 times the
workload which the current debian team handle, by dropping the entire
debian repository onto them and expecting them to be able to recompile
it and maintain it is... i think you'd agree, completely unrealistic.

i believe you'd agree that by comparison, maintaining even fifty
packages amongst a team of say even five people is something that
could conceivably be managed on an emergency day-to-day basis.

l.